Xenonauts

The music isn't memorable, the combat is glitched and poor; it has little story; and the ending, victorious image feels like a hollow reward. There's some copy-pasting going on in that ending picture, too. (Two of the men, on the left, have raised elbows which look identical.) It had many issues which made it annoying, and I didn't enjoy it. The ground-combat was the most flawed. Reserving TU to do burst shots didn't work. Hiding behind cover was often pointless. Shots went more than half-way across the map for the aliens, and they had impeccable aim. Meanwhile, my battle-hardened soldiers had trouble shooting aliens at all. They'd often miss an alien that had no cover, and was only a few tiles away. Sometimes my soldiers would go berserk, and even miss their allies next to them. Morale was supposed to stop their mental breakdowns, but its depletion didn't show like health loss did. The morale bar always looked full. I even had one solider whose morale was 99+ at full: it'd show as full while he went under alien control, dropped his weapon and ran, panicked, or went berserk. What makes all of this especially bad is that ground combat is a major part of the game. Its issues become irritating over time. Air combat was also problematic. Auto-resolving gets worse results than fighting the battles out. This could make sense since it forces the player to play. However, these air fights are repetitive, frequent, and dull. The temptation to auto-resolve was high, but a player would likely lose if this was done. For example, I could manually take down 3 heavy fighters with 2 interceptors and with ease, but auto-resolve showed that I had almost no chance to win. To progress well I had to constantly micromanage the planes. Furthermore, if a battle goes sour, you have to wait and watch while your planes head for the edge of the grid. You can't simply hit a button and cancel out. Even if there's no chance of the enemy catching your retreating planes, you have to watch it try.

A technically complex and potentially beautiful but cold and incredibly hard heir of the XCom series, from which it copies most of the concepts, mechanics and style. Don't get me wrong, for some people it's probably an awesome game, going back to the time of the first XCom games with a strong original vibe. Unfortunately then the game turns deadly at random times, with the player not being able to do much to prevent it apparently. I had the feeling i might have loved it, then when i started it I felt i would not, then in less than one hour i had it uninstalled. It really is more a simulator than a strategy game in a way it seems to become quickly repetitive. Like i said, some might love it, but me I didn't. Gets a 60/100 from me because i mostly see the potential for others, but for me it was a miss.

I start right away what frustrates me: The Ground Combat Your soldiers are squishy and can't hit anything while the aliens snipe you from outside your viewing distance. You want to storm a UFO? Oh great, move your soldiers through a 2 tile wide kill corridor against aliens that can shoot through walls appearently - and don't think you can camp outside, as the enemy won't leave the ship. But here is the absolute kicker: Psy attacks work across the whole map, so prepare to have half your squad in panic mode before meeting the first enemy on the map - Bonus points for having a mind controlled soldiers 3 turns in. Without the edit of a gamefile that basically disables this failure of a gamemechanic it's literally unplayable. I want to like this game, I tried a lot of things to make it fun.... but nope, no fun to be found, you're better off getting ANY X-Com title instead

...it crashes often for me (more than a couple of years ago) and then I get asked to rate the game until I do. I can't recommend ironman because you can't autosave and then you lose everything in a crash. Five stars+ if it starts crashing less.

I love the gameplay, but the game is so buggy I have remove a star. I prefer the mechanics to the similar X-Com games. It's one of my favorite games, but graphic layering glitches and can some terrain incomprehensible, and the game randomly crashes. But, it's one of my favorite games and I'll play dispite the bugs.